Monday, February 18, 2019

Is Muller an anti-pope?

Silly question, of course, but that's what Austen Ivereigh suggested on Twitter.

My latest on LifeSiteNews:

Gerhard, Cardinal Müller, until recently the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF)—the third most senior Prelate in the Church—recently published what he called a Manifesto of Faith. It consists of quotations and paraphrases of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and avoids the hot-button issues of the moment. There is nothing in it about divorce, about receiving Communion in a state of mortal sin, about homosexuality, or about Capital Punishment. Müller is well-known as a friend and collaborator with the liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez: he is not exactly a theological conservative from Central Casting.

Reading this document I wondered why, if he didn’t want to say anything directly related to the current doctrinal crisis in the Church, he had bothered to pick up his pen. The reaction to his Manifesto, however, made me think again.

Austen Ivereigh, Pope Francis’ biographer and a key member of “Team Francis”, the self-appointed interpreters and defenders of the Pope, was enraged. He condemned Müller's Manifesto in a tweet:

A naked power play. Declare a state of confusion, then promote yourself as the one to “resolve” it. In implying that a former Vatican bureaucrat needs to step in to fill a supposed vacuum, you delegitimise the papal magisterium. And confuse the faithful.

3 comments:

"... not exactly a theological conservative from Central Casting." Considering the fact that Muller is on record as denying the Resurrection and Transubstantiation, he's 'not exactly' a Catholic. The fact he's now seen as a conservative says a lot about the true antipope - Francis.

In reality, “body and blood of Christ” do not mean the material components of the man Jesus during his lifetime or in his transfigured corporeality. Rather, body and blood here mean the presence of Christ in the sign of the medium of bread and wine, which [presence] is made communicable in the here and now of sense-bound human perception. Just as before Easter the disciples were perceptibly together with Jesus by hearing his words and perceiving him in his sensory figure in accordance with human nature, we now have fellowship with Jesus Christ, communicated through the eating and drinking of the bread and the wine.

(Gerhard Ludwig Müller, The Mass: Source of Christian Life, pp. 139-140)In the Eucharist the believer does not consume the physical elements of Jesus’ body, but in the signs of the consecrated bread and wine he communicates in the humanity of Jesus, his mission, and his destiny in the Cross and Resurrection.

(Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Catholic Dogmatic Theology, p. 710)

When he was challenged on these and other writings when he was appointed head of the CDF he simply dismissed the charges as 'baseless' and insisted he did believe in Transubstantiation. But he did not retract his comments, merely asserted that they were orthodox.On the Resurrection:A running camera would not have been able to make an audio-visual recording of either the Easter manifestations of Jesus in front of his disciples, nor of the Resurrection event, which, at its core, is the consummation of the personal relation of the Father to the incarnate Son in the Holy Ghost. In contrast to human reason, animals and technical devices are not capable of a transcendental experience and thus also lack the ability to be addressed by the Word of God through perceptible phenomena and signs. Only human reason in its inner unity of categoricality [sic] and transcendentality [sic] is determinable by the Spirit of God to enable it to perceive in the sensory cognitive image (triggered by the manifestation event) the person-reality of Jesus as the cause of this sensory-mental cognitive image.

(Gerhard L. Müller, Katholische Dogmatik, 8th ed. [Freiburg: Herder, 2010], p. 300)He also stated: “Whether the women’s visit to the tomb in the early Easter morning and the discovery that the Body of Jesus is [sic] no longer there, was a historical occurrence in the manner portrayed, does not need to be decided here. It’s possible that this [narrative] reflected a veneration of the tomb by the community of Jerusalem” (p. 303)

Clarity is lacking, of course, but such are the writings of Modernists.